The increased use of information, and technology to organize and take advantage of that information, has led to an increase in the demand on data centers. As a result data centers have encountered problems with managing resources and providing appropriate levels of service for hosted applications.
Data centers host business applications according to expected execution service levels, taking into consideration factors such as operational responsiveness and application performance, availability and security. These expectations are often satisfied via isolation and over-provisioning in the data center.
Isolation involves the separation of unrelated applications from each other by allocating each application with its associated execution environment of dedicated network and server infrastructure to ensure that high application demand, faults and security breaches do not adversely affect the performance, availability and security of another application. Over-provisioning involves an over supply of server power to meet anticipated peak application demand. This provides an insurance against poor response times in the event that an application encounters unexpected demand. When isolation is used and each application is over-provisioned within each isolated application environment there is a resulting trapped capacity that can't be used by other applications during times of high demand. The use of isolation and over-provisioning to meet expected service levels results in a low aggregated resource utilization and optimization.